Monday, March 14, 2005

PDFs and Multiple Columns

This is a quickie lament. In this electronic age why do so many journals cling to multi-column formats? A pdf file with multiple columns is extremely difficult to read on screen. Is a single column format so hard to read on paper that there must be a multi-column version for that reason? I note that Educause, presumably an exemplar for the field, puts up its documents in both pdf (multi-column and presumably identical to the print version) and html (single column and much easier to read on the screen). Is this really the best approach? The pdf versions are fully justified while the html versions are left justified.

I note that this particular post is fully justified (the Blogger HTML editor has that formatting built in) while all the previous posts are left justified. Can't somebody decide which is the most readable and then we have one? My vote would be for single column pdf that is fully justified.

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